Tag Archives: txt

Teenage Girl…

Posted on by

It looks like June was probably a high water mark for me at least in one respect. Somehow I managed to send 3,730 text messages. I’ve often joked about it, but it appears to be confirmed that I do, in fact, have the phone habits of a teenage girl… This fact was punctuated by the fact that a 20-something chick friend of mine assures me that my text volume is somewhere in the neighborhood of six times what hers is for the same time period. That little factoid is made even more exciting when you do the quick math and find out it’s also approximately equivalent to about five months of her average number of texts. Yeah, thanks for that bit of trivia, Allyson.

A more enlightened individual might find these numbers a reason for pause, but I’m fairly sure I’m just going to give them a disinterested “meh” and go on about my day. So if you need anything, just go ahead and text… given the number of rollover minutes I have expiring every month, it definitely seems like that might be the only actual way to get in touch with me with some kind of consistency.

Phone behaving badly or: My excuse to go to the Apple Store…

Posted on by

In case anyone has been trying to reach me, I apparently have a phone problem. After getting an irate phone call wondering why I haven’t returned any of a dozen text messages that were sent in my direction, I thought it wise to give my friends at AT&T a call. After a little over an hour on the horn with three levels of tech support they narrowed it down to a) a SIM card issue or b) a hardware issue. Apparently the only thing they know for sure is it’s not an issue with their network. They at least were nice enough to point out that “oh yes, we can see a number of failed texts coming in to your number today… that’s really weird.” Really weird particularly because just as many were making it through the system as well. Sigh.

To make the long story of technical support a little shorter, they wanted me to go over to the local AT&T store this morning and let them fiddle with the SIM for a while. In the interest of full disclosure, I have to admit that I don’t actually know where the closest AT&T store actually is. In the event that it’s an actual hardware issue rather than just a SIM thing, I thought it would be a better idea to go ahead and bring my ailing 4S back to the Apple Store from whence it came… Which is fine, because I have an unholy love of the Apple Store… except for the part where it’s Saturday, and at the mall, and it’s going to be full of people. And we all know how I feel about places like that.

If there’s any up side to this, it’s probably that whoever decides to buy my iPhone after I pick up the new model in two weeks will in all likelihood be getting a freshly refurbished replacement model since a swap out is pretty much the standard procedure for my trips to the Genius Bar. Still I wish the old girl had held out for just a another 14 days and saved me the trouble. And if anyone out there has tried to text me in let’s say the last 24 hours and hasn’t gotten a response, yeah, sorry about that. Hopefully by around 1:00 this afternoon we’ll have things resolved… or not. It’d say that odds are 50/50 at best that incoming texts will ever be reliable again, but that’s just the optimist in me coming through.

Official IM…

Posted on by

We have an officially sanctioned Yahoo IM wannabe instant messaging system at work. That we could just as easily use the real thing for non-sensitive, unclassified communication isn’t really the issue. Or maybe it’s just beside the point. It’s resisting the natural temptation to plaster it with field of lmao, wtf, and stfu that gives me the most trouble. Even sitting here with a tie (something I swore I wasn’t going to do again, btw) doesn’t quite give me a subconscious nudge I need to remember that I’m not txting with someone or fiddling around on Google chat, but that I’m actually supposed to be some kind of professional communication tool. So yeah, I guess you could say I have a level of discomfort with the official IM.

As much as I love my tech, I’m not sure I get the real value added here. Was someone not getting back to you fast enough with email or do you just think the flashing blue box in the task bar is harder to ignore than the unopened envelope in Outlook? I’m sure there was a great reason that you needed this capability, but I can’t for the life of me figure out what it was. In the meantime, I’ll be busy copyediting every message I send trying to make sure it doesn’t read like it was written by a 13 year old girl.

Editorial Note: This part of a continuing series of posts previously available on a now defunct website. They are appearing on http://www.jeffreytharp.com for the first time. This post has been time stamped to correspond to its original publication date.

He’s off the grid…

Posted on by

I actually met someone this afternoon that doesn’t own a cell phone. Or have a Facebook account. He’s never Tweeted, Skyped, or sent a text message. I didn’t know in 21st century America that such people existed. Apparently they do exist. And not just in Unibomber-style one room cabins in the wilds of Montana. In fact, they do tech support for Uncle Sam.

This also goes a long way towards explaining the problems I have with my office computer. Sigh.